In yet another of his works, this popular essay-writer devotes an entire essay to the subject of our judgments of other men. Who does not feel, he asks, that to describe with fidelity the least portion of the entangled nature that is within him would be no easy matter? And yet the same man who feels this, and who, perhaps, would be ashamed of talking at hazard about the properties of a flower, of a weed, of some figure in geometry, will put forth his guesses about the character of his brother-man, as if he had the fullest authority for all that he was saying. It is shown in detail how an opinion of some man’s character and conduct gets abroad which is formed after a wrong method, by prejudiced persons, upon a false statement of facts, respecting a matter which they cannot possibly understand; and how this is then left to be inflated by Folly, and blown about by Idleness. There is among Wordsworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places, one which is memorable if only as containing one of the most admired lines he ever wrote, descriptive of Lady of the Mere— “Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,” —but which is also pertinent to the present occasion, as pointing a moral, after the poet’s wont to moralise his song. A man had been seen in the distance by the poet and his friends, angling. No great harm in that, my masters? Nay; but the angler was in peasant’s garb, and the season was mid-harvest, and therefore, and on the spot, they voted him improvident and reckless. But when they came up to him, these over-hasty judges found in the man they had summarily condemned, a poor mortal wasted by sickness, and all too weak to labour in the harvest-field, but using his best skill to gain a pittance from the dead unfeeling lake that knew not of his wants:— “I will not say What thoughts immediately were ours, nor how The happy idleness of that sweet morn With all its lovely images, was changed To serious musing and to self-reproach. Nor did we fail to see within ourselves What need there is to be reserved in speech, And temper all our thoughts with charity. —Therefore, unwilling to forget that day, My friend, myself, and she who then received The same admonishment, have called the place By a memorial name, uncouth indeed As e’er by mariner was given to bay Or foreland on a new-discovered coast; And POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears.”[21]